This Place is interesting to the historian as being the spot where Counts Egmont and Hoorn suffered decapitation in the reign of Philip II of Spain, by order of the Duke of Alva, who witnessed the execution from a window of one of the houses.

George IV. had only one wife, but she suffered the persecutions of six; and if she escaped decapitation or divorce, it was from no failure of inclination or instruments.

According to a legend, the daughter of Herodias was a renowned acrobat, and on a bas-relief in the Cathedral of Rouen we find this Jewish dancer turning somersaults before Herod, so as to fascinate him, and thus obtain the decapitation of John the Baptist.

On the 20th of August, 1191, five weeks after the surrender of St. Jean d'Acre, he found that Saladin was not fulfilling with sufficient promptitude the conditions of capitulation, and, to bring him up to time, he ordered the decapitation, before the walls of the place, of, according to some, twenty-five hundred, and, according to others, five thousand, Mussulman prisoners remaining in his hands.

His enchanter, who is gifted with the power of surviving decapitation and pursuing the decapitator so long as a fated hair remains on his head, turns deadly pale in the face when it is scalped, and falls lifeless from his horse.

I saw the guillotine, which is now the usual mode of punishment, fixed on the centre of the Piazza and the criminal escorted there by a body of troops; but I did not stop to witness the decapitation, having no taste for that sort of pleasuring.